7/14/22
Newsletter41
The Ass Crack of Dawn
At 4:45 AM there is still no hint of dawn.
The only international word is “OK.” The word began as sort of mistake. America’s eighth president was Martin Van Buren from Kinderhook, New York. Van Buren was well known by his nickname, “Old Kinderhook.” When he ran for president his slogan was, “Van Buren is O.K.” Old Kinderhook. But OK was misconstrued by many people and thought to mean “good.”
I’ve never heard anyone get this question right. Who was our youngest president? The answer is consistently, John Kennedy. Now folks will offer Barack Obama. In fact, the youngest president, at 42, was Theodore Roosevelt. However, Teddy was not elected. He became president because he was vice-president to William McKinley who was assassinated. The youngest elected president was John Kennedy at 45.
World War I was declared on July 28, 1914. The first battle of the war was the Battle of the Marne that began on September 5. The Germans were at their battle positions on the west side of Marne River within a week. The British and the French, however, were so uncoordinated, with absolutely no clue how to move their soldiers a couple of hundred miles, that it took them both a month to get there. The British army was literally going around in circles, and the men kept seeing the same villages go by. The French couldn’t find vehicles, so many soldiers took taxi cabs to the front.
The documentary, “John Lennon: Imagine,” is about the making of his album, “Imagine.” John is woken up very early one morning at his estate by his security people. They found an intruder, a crazy American guy wearing a green army jacket, on the property and brought him to the house. John comes out, clearly having just been woken with his hair sticking up. The crazy American intruder sees John, then launches into his deeply appreciative explanation of why he’s there by saying, “You completely express my feelings when say, ‘Boy, you’ve got to carry that weight.’” A look of pain crosses John’s face as he says, “That’s Paul’s song,” then he invites the guy in for breakfast.
The term “The suspension of disbelief” is misused all the time as an excuse for illogical stories. Here is an example of our communal suspension of disbelief, which is believing in the face of the unbelievable. In “The Godfather” when Sonny discovers that his sister Connie has been beaten up by her husband, Carlo, he goes after him. Sonny finds Carlo sitting on a stoop, then proceeds to beat the shit out of him. One of Sonny’s punches completely misses Carlo’s face by a foot and is obviously fake. But it’s such a terrific performance by the late James Caan that they used it because, other than that phony punch, it has to have been their best take.
The last shot of “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid” is a brilliant special effect that is really unnoticeable unless you’re aware of it. Butch and Sundance come out of a doorway toward us with their pistols out and it freeze-frames. This image was used for the poster. In the movie the shot of the two men in freeze-frame slowly begins to pull back and back until you see the whole town square around them. If they had simply freeze-framed the shot, there’s nothing to pull back to. If you legitimately pulled back from the shot on the 35mm film, the next thing you’d see wouldn’t be the town square, it would be the sprocket holes on the 35mm film. What the great special effects man, L.B. Abbott, did was to catch the same moment from a hundred yards away with an old-fashioned 8x10 still camera that gave you an extremely high-resolution, large negative, that encompassed the whole town square with the two guys at the very center. So what happens is Butch and Sundance come out the door, it freezes and invisibly becomes the still photograph, then pulls back on the photo that includes all of the stuff around them. I’m not sure that I explained that all that well, but it’s early.
What do you call an Irishman sitting on your lawn? Paddy O’Furniture.
Alas, the dawn has arrived.